The mobile market, everyone agrees, is the technology industry’s future. What’s not so clear is which company is best positioned to thrive in that future. For smartphones in particular, the traditional metrics are confusing … So who’s winning? When pondering this, I find myself thinking about dependencies. What is each company doing for itself, and in what ways does each company rely on others? I think this balance, much more than profits or market share, is what will determine long-term success.

John Siracusa at Hypercritical.co.Read the whole thing for his assessment of how the major players (Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft) stack up on this “dependency” metric.